ConnDOT Rail Plan

Did anyone seen the Connecticut DOT's Rail Plan?

The link is: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... 1865,d.eWU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I think it would be great if it did happen -- especially the part where MassDot and the Pioneer Valley region of Government would like to reopen the Armory branch in Mass...

Comments?

Some of this is old stuff and we have had numerous discussions on some items right here. I see a possible future for New London IF they can come up with the money for clearance and other improvements to the New England Central line. I do not see any future for major port operations by rail at either Bridgeport or New Haven mostly due to clearance issues especially in New Haven.
Most of the stuff in that document is simply "PIPE DREAMS" and I do not see any way that any entity whether it be private (the railroads themselves) or public (Federal, State or Local), to do everything mentioned would cost billions and I am not kidding,where do they think the money is going to come from?
The report itself, well some outfit made money on that one and really what does it tell anybody that they didn't already know or at least should have known. Incidentally I did spot a few errors in that thing too but I am not going to go in to that here.
To say the least, I am not one bit impressed, some things might eventually happen but most of them will not happen, not in my lifetime nor in anybody else's lifetime either.
Some of the passenger proposals are just as far out too, electrification to Waterbury, NO WAY!!!.
Noel Weaver

It was a fairly typical report... I agree the priority items are a pie in the sky wishlist, but the RRs were probably just doing what they were told by a ConnDOT paper pusher, list you wants in priority order.

This is the same format as most State Rail Plans. If you pull up the one for Massachusetts or Vermont or New Jersey it's going to read much the same. They define a set of data collection and feedback metrics, define who the stakeholders are on the state's rail system, outline current conditions and current projects, throw some freight and passenger data around, take a rough stab at organizing a long-term vision they'll work towards (e.g. 286K freight mainlines, facilitating more intermodal, fulfilling the PTC mandate, modernizing car fleet,s etc.), summarize the challenges, summarize the stakeholders' wishlists, summarize the things they don't have enough data on and need to collect before the next revision of the Plan, and rank some tippy-top project priorities (again, on much more general/thematic grounds than a real action plan). And then it's updated every 4 years.

The document's purpose is just for collecting and organizing everyone's thoughts on paper. While every state is obviously going to pimp its politicians' pet projects to the hilt in the Rail Plan to raised eyebrows, its purpose is not the same as any state DOT's official Transportation Improvement Plan where the projects get real cost estimates, real project priority, and real political horse-trading. This is for establishing the lay of the land and the possibles by giving a "State of the Rail Network" address, establishing the overarching themes rail system improvements should support, and establishing types of projects that merit further study. It's not a fantasy wishlist for expansion projects, nor is ever intended to be. What it does do is define all the variables, so when somebody goes to pick and choose projects for further study they stay somewhat on-script and choose from the master list that supports the overall themes the state wants to emphasize. It's the "Universe of Projects" section that appears in all kinds of vision statements by Regional MPO's and even individual towns...the project superset that is supposed to keep everyone on-topic when they do further study. For example...you don't see anything here about reactivating the Canal Line for passenger service because, well, that's silly and wouldn't make sense 70 years from now let alone now. So if some band of state legislators with way too much time on their hands starts calling for $2M in study money on that corridor...they have more reasons not to cave to pols with the attention span the size of a gnat's on a project that in no way, shape, or form underscores ANY theme on the Rail Plan. That doesn't mean there aren't some dodgy ones on the universe of projects list. No one expects the whole list to ever be fulfilled. But if idle hands want to waste money studying something, at least let it be a project that jibes with the freight and passenger priorities outlined in the Rail Plan.

That's all it aims to do...organize and clarify by themes. If foamer fantasies start showing up on the state's TIP instead...that's when you have to ask what some DOT head has been smoking.



CDOT's plan is a little more interesting than the rest of New England's in that they actually polled each of the freight carriers in the state and itemized their full wishlists in the appendices with projected costs. Usually these state plans just sort of quickly summarize, but CDOT gave P&W, NECR, CSO, CNZR, HRCC, PAS, Valley, Naugy, and Branford Steam real pen-and-pad and said "put it in writing and rank 'em", then attached cost estimates. So it's interesting to hear the private carriers state their priorities in their own words. I can't blame the little carriers like CNZR for getting a tad grandiose and completist with its list...they don't often get a big stage to say these things...but ranking the lists by priority it is mostly mundane state-of-repair stuff similar to what the shortlines have been getting recent grant money for. There's never an expectation that the list will ever get fulfilled down to the foamer stuff at the bottom. Generally speaking the big boys P&W, NECR, and PAS kept their lists pretty conservative and square on state-of-repair initiatives.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:That's all it aims to do...organize and clarify by themes. If foamer fantasies start showing up on the state's TIP instead...that's when you have to ask what some DOT head has been smoking.

That makes sense. I started to wonder about the thing when I got to the mention of passenger service on the Manchester Secondary, not just to the current end-of-track at Manchester (not that screwy-- I-84 traffic's a bear and Route 6 is scary) but to Mansfield and.. Uncasville.

Ridgefielder wrote:

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:That's all it aims to do...organize and clarify by themes. If foamer fantasies start showing up on the state's TIP instead...that's when you have to ask what some DOT head has been smoking.

That makes sense. I started to wonder about the thing when I got to the mention of passenger service on the Manchester Secondary, not just to the current end-of-track at Manchester (not that screwy-- I-84 traffic's a bear and Route 6 is scary) but to Mansfield and.. Uncasville.

Well...if you connect the Manchester and Willimantic ends you do get a straight Hartford-New London shot down NECR that would be very attractive for regular commuter rail and totally rock for casino travel. Look at all the revenue the private casino buses take in and what white-knuckle driving it is trying to pass one of those insane bus drivers on CT 2, CT 9, or I-95. If the thru connection existed that's a pretty duh-obvious service to initiate with Mohegan Sun being right next to the tracks.

But that's not really the prevailing reason to reconnect the NYNE...it's just one of several utilizations that are gravy on top. #1A is probably getting thru freight off the Shoreline, getting a double-stack route into Hartford Yard, uniting CSO and NECR, and giving P&W an overhead route to Central CT. #1B is commuter rail to Willimantic as relief valve for "Suicide 6". #2 is bootstrapping onto NECR for New London passenger...certainly for the casinos, but that's viable Hartford-hub commuter rail in its own right with CT 2 being the choked substandard nightmare it is. #3 is pre-provisioning a path for Amtrak's 2040 Inland NEC by laying claim to an active ROW (which may not necessarily conform to the entirety of the old NYNE...could be talking something new repurposed from the most recent I-384 extension ROW or even a combo highway + rail build from Bolton Notch to Willimantic).


Obviously none of this is going to happen soon. I don't think the juice is going to be there to push it forward until Amtrak's got its 2040 studies house in order and has narrowed down the route options, and Manchester (or even mini-reactivation to Vernon/Exit 65) commuter rail has to be an established service first to crest the momentum for Willimantic commuter. But that's why you put it on the State Rail Plan under critical future reactivation corridors that need present-day preservation and near/mid-term studies. It's mega enough potential at the 25-year range to set the table now on how they would frame it when it's time to study, and to ID the potential stakeholders like NECR, P&W, Mohegan Sun, US 6 and CT 2 commuters, Amtrak/SLE traffic relief from Shoreline freight slots, trucks off I-84 from having a Worcester-Hartford clearance route, etc. etc. It's not about planned builds, it's about organizing thoughts/themes so they know where to start at quantifying a future proposal.

F-line:

I think that you might see the NYNE back in, because of 'Suicide 6'. I used to travel route 6, and I thought I'd be killed on it. Just think of what G&W could do with NEC and CSO connected. Along with P&W.

No matter whether it is the P & W, NEC or whatever, the basic freight business is GONE and will not return, not this year, not next year and not in 10 or 20 years either. Today it would be impossible to handle the volume of freight that was handled by the New Haven Railroad back in the 50's and 60's simply because the clearances are more restrictive today in this entire territory, the cars are higher and heavier. It only takes one low spot to restrict an entire line and there are a number of spots in Connecticut where restrictions would exist and it would be nearly impossible to get rid of them. As I said before, New London is probably possible with some major work along the NEC but the rest of Connecticut, just forget it even thinking about it will cost money. I wonder how much that report cost?
Noel Weaver

Noel:

Granted, you will never see the amount of traffic that the NH saw in the 1950s and 1960s. The politicans and unions killed most of the manufacturing jobs in CT (and now with the anti-gun liberals, gun manufacturing might be leaving, too.). But I think if moderates - From both parties could get elected, CT could become a state where manufacturing could come, too. That and if we could promote the Ports (and reconnect the port of Bridgeport to the NEC) we might have trains running.
Noel, I think the state needs to rebuild the old line from Manchester to Willimantic. Just think of how much P&W and the G&W could save if they didn't have to pay AMTRAK. If I was a shipper (in East Hartford) and my customer was in Foxborough, I think I could save $$ if my shipment went from East Hartford to Plainfield to worcester to Foxborough, instead of Eh to Hartford to West Springfield to Selkirk to Boston then to Foxborough.
Direct rail would save $$$.

And exactly how much freight moves by any method from East Hartford to Foxborough?

ebtmikado wrote:And exactly how much freight moves by any method from East Hartford to Foxborough?

It doesn't. It goes on trucks between I-84 to Mass Pike to I-495 or I-91 from Springfield. But that's not really the point. East Hartford and Foxboro aren't exchanging local goods. CSX has a daily local out of Framingham via Worcester that covers what little Foxboro-area business there is. And there are locals in CT covering what little local rail deliveries there are. Other than the trace amounts of rail-captive usual suspects like lumber yards, chemical plants, etc...the majority of the stable carloads/tonnage is the state's bread-and-butter trap rock mining industry and scrap/trash movement. That's it. None of it is growable in any meaningful way. Neither are the Eastern MA locals. Those local jobs are sitting more or less at their natural level.


Where CT is a black hole shut out from the rest of New England is with intermodal. All of that huge investment in Massachusetts for double-stacks on CSX and PAS and massively upgraded regional yards in Worcester and Ayer doesn't take trucks off the road in CT. The only substantial long-distance traffic the state gets now is with NECR's and P&W's very new Willimantic interchange. And that is almost entirely out-of-state to out-of-state connecting Providence/port of Davisville, Worcester, and Northern New England + Canada. CT is still flyover country from what those two carriers are aiming to do, since they don't have in-state yards of meaningful size, adequate road connectivity, or multi-carrier interchange connectivity to make hardly any money offloading in-state. Massachusetts is netting significant economic gains on new intermodal traffic, significant economic gains on truck traffic originating locally (with local truckers paying local income taxes) along the I-495 belt instead of out-of-state from Albany, and reductions in cross-state truck traffic on the interstates. All of which will get bigger over time. The rest of New England is getting into the act with Pan Am 286K loads reaching Portland in 5 years and double stacks within a dozen years, Vermont investing in the NECR Canadian gateway, Rhode Island investing in port of Davisville and P&W main capacity, and Maine being ground zero for some major carrier horse-trading with SLR's owners on an acquisition spree and J.D. Irving eyeing MMA's carcass to each position themselves competitively against PAR's imminent capacity expansion east of Ayer.

Where's Connecticut in all this intermodal jockeying? On trucks...same as it ever was. I-84, I-91, I-95, Suicide 6, etc. Choked with trucks now, choked with trucks forever, choked with more trucks than ever with the huge increases in Worcester- and West Springfield-originating intermodal that are on their way. With nothing but Amtrak and constrained non-clearance routes to get anywhere in the western two thirds of the state, flyover country on the NECR-P&W interchange, and not much happening with the ports to shore up New London even to the level of the successful niche Davisville is carving out. That has to change over the next 2 decades or the state is going to get left in the dust by its neighbors, choking on its own truck congestion, and paying much higher price for basic goods than the states equipped to get high-capacity, long-distance intermodal efficiently on their doorsteps.


Yeah...absolutely they have to find their 'in'. They have to get more of those goods stopping locally. They have to get a clearance route into Hartford Yard within 20 years so there's a central node relieving 84 and 91 as the only viable shipping routes out of Springfield/Deerfield and Worcester/495. They have to rehab the rail system's physical plant and get better secondary-level productivity out of the lines that bootstrap onto 84 and 91 fanning out of Hartford. They have to find productive roles for ports of New London and New Haven...right-sized with useful specialty. They have to debug the Housy corridor (#1, by getting the current incompetents the hell out of there) so that highway-poor corridor gets adequately backstopped. They have to do some combination--by appropriate degrees of priority and proportional investment--of all these things or they end up falling further behind their neighbors.

It's not easy. There are clear priorities that have to come first. There is a lot to study about right-sizing the types of freight to cultivate (much like MA and RI are doing), because the sky isn't the limit, that local industrial base isn't coming back, and they can waste a lot of money if they don't hit the nail on the head with bang-for-buck projects. And it will take many decades.


But this is why you thematically articulate it a document like this. It's a compass, not an implementation plan or foamer wishlist. You dig for more detail based on these themes and refine-and-revise the action items from there. Every state's rail plan does this. I am not sure why this is so hard a hard thing for some to grasp, or why reaction #1 for some folks is "they're smoking crack!" EVERY state does their plan like this.

FLRailFan1 wrote:Noel:

Granted, you will never see the amount of traffic that the NH saw in the 1950s and 1960s. The politicans and unions killed most of the manufacturing jobs in CT (and now with the anti-gun liberals, gun manufacturing might be leaving, too.). But I think if moderates - From both parties could get elected, CT could become a state where manufacturing could come, too. That and if we could promote the Ports (and reconnect the port of Bridgeport to the NEC) we might have trains running.
Noel, I think the state needs to rebuild the old line from Manchester to Willimantic. Just think of how much P&W and the G&W could save if they didn't have to pay AMTRAK. If I was a shipper (in East Hartford) and my customer was in Foxborough, I think I could save $$ if my shipment went from East Hartford to Plainfield to worcester to Foxborough, instead of Eh to Hartford to West Springfield to Selkirk to Boston then to Foxborough.
Direct rail would save $$$.

Please don't address me and bring politics in to this discussion. I have my opinions on gun control, liberals and conservatives and other related stuff BUT IT DOES NOT MIX WITH THE DISCUSSIONS HERE AND I DO NOT BRING MY VIEW INTO THE PICTURE HERE. As for your political views, I COULD CARE LESS.
You are in a fantasy when it comes to railroads in Connecticut, I have "locked horns" with you on this elsewhere and i don't intend to continue it here at least not now.
Noel Weaver

these plans fail to address the seminal point. railroad pricing to offset the inefficient railroad infrastructure. good example? the silly 'new gateway' montreal to worcester via necr-danielson-pw. how's that working? i tried to do a sludge move from rocky hill to virginia. i eventually used 15 cars for a 2 car/day move. gave up and trucked it to harlem river yard where my virginia turn was 5 x. railroads refused to price to offset the horrible service. so all the state plans can do is employ folk with no experience to write plans that have no chance of succeeding. inside work, no heavy lifting. my solution is simple. if taxpayer funds are used for railroad infrastructure, then railroad pricing must be 1.80x variable costs. no more 'what the traffic will bear'. maybe, someday when none of these plans yield freight traffic municipal transportation folk will wake up. ken patrick

Looks like the total cost for all the freight railroad projects listed near the bottom is around 480 million. That's actually cheaper than I was expecting it to be. Now they just need to come up with the money! How about the voters passing a 500 million bond for rail improvements! Haha

I give up. If you guys want to work yourselves into such a froth about foamer-this and foamer-that in a document that serves no such purpose, go right ahead. In fact, go ahead and Google the term "state rail plan". You will find several dozen states' worth of them on there in the same format, outlining the same things. Have a field day screaming "FANTASY LAND!!!" at your screen, because everyone does it the same way. These are mandated submissions to the FRA by U.S. law, with a set format. Go read the FRA's own guidelines: https://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0511" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

These are NOT IMPLEMENTATION PLANS. They are surveys of current conditions, needs, and wants to inform further study. That's it. It's either missing the point entirely or an excuse to bring an unrelated rant about CDOT or rail pricing into a thread that has nothing to do with those complaints.

It's law. The format is codified by law. Calm down and save the bile for some other topic. As I said before, if you see "foamer" line items appearing in a SIP document or a study that is chewing up real money, THAT'S the time to ask what the state is smoking. The State Rail Plan does not in any way, shape, or form set a budget or implementation plan. It fulfills a legal FRA obligation as a "State of the State Rail System" address and roadmap. That's all.